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Inmagic Gatherer

Use the Gatherer to Easily Harvest Relevant Content from Internal and External Sources

To remain competitive, organizations need to make smart business decisions quickly. The ability to search and find relevant and timely information is critical to success. In today's enterprise, there is no lack of available information - MSOffice and other tools used daily make it easy for all of us to publish content electronically. But, as The Delphi Group noted in their white paper Taxonomy & Content Classification, "The information based economy is in danger of drowning in a sea of irrelevant, unstructured data."

It has become impossible for organizations to find what they need. The number one problem is unorganized information. The Inmagic Gatherer is a spidering tool that can assist organizations in addressing their own information glut. This out-of-the-box solution allows an enterprise to automatically build and maintain a completely searchable knowledge base of critical content - harvested from information repositories within the company or from competitor or other sites on the Web.

Cataloging and Searching with the Gatherer

The Gatherer crawls your corporate intranet, extranet, Internet, or even competitor Web sites, then gathers information (HTML, Text files, MS Office documents, presentations and PDF files. You determine which information you need and how much of it you'd like, and the Inmagic Gatherer does the rest. What's more, the Gather enables you to add metadata tags and other information to further categorize the information.

An easy-to-use administration interface allows you to specify the network servers or files to be crawled as well as schedule the crawling. For Web-based resources, the user can specify a Web site or list of Web sites to be crawled by the Gatherer.

Once the content is harvested by the Gatherer, it is loaded into the appropriate DB/TextWorks® knowledge base and is available immediately for searching by the end-user. With Inmagic's Web publishing tool, DB/Text® WebPublisher, this content can be simultaneously deployed to the Web or a company intranet and used as a part of a knowledge management or other enterprise information portal.

How it Works

The Gatherer crawls various content sources such as network file systems and Web sites. Once content is gathered, full text and document properties are extracted and a load file is produced that includes information about each document from each source. This includes the location of the stored extract text, the location of a local copy of the original document and the location from the document was originally gathered.

The Gatherer employs filters to retrieve content from various sources and produces native format copies of the gathered content, documents containing the extracted text, and XML-formatted load files containing metadata. The content can then be loaded into a DB/TextWorks searchable knowledge base.

Gain an Edge on Your Competitors

Chances are you visit your competitors' Web sites to keep apprised of any major announcements. Most likely, there is also competitive information residing in files throughout your company. The Gatherer crawls this information to create a searchable competitive intelligence database. Just set the Gatherer to check for updates as often as you'd like--daily, weekly, monthly--to give you that competitive edge! And if you find that you're experiencing "information overload," instruct the Gatherer to retrieve specific Web pages, portions of Web sites, or URLs. When the Gatherer is combined with IntelliMagic, you have a robust enterprise-wide competitive intelligence solution that integrates relevant internal and external intelligence searchable from the Intranet.

Easy to Set Up, Easy to Use, Easy to Maintain

With its quick set-up, you'll be up and running in no time. The Gatherer requires little training and can be deployed rapidly for low-cost-of-ownership. Just install the Gatherer, tell it where to go, when, and how often, and you're on your way. Customize it to meet your needs. Then forget about it.

But what if you need to edit or modify Gatherer results? No problem. Inmagic's indexing backend, DB/TextWorks, enables you to easily interact with the Gatherer. You can add metadata, delete URLs, or create search result views with our user-friendly WYSIWYG drag-and- drop tool.

Worried that our Gatherer will increase your network traffic? Don't be concerned. The Inmagic Gatherer actually minimizes traffic, since you can set it up to run during off-peak hours. Set it up so the Gatherer crawls your intranet while your company sleeps. Plus, unchanged or duplicate documents are not re-spidered or re-indexed.

How the Inmagic Gatherer Can Help You

Here's how some of our customers are benefiting from our harvesting tools:

  • Competitive intelligence professionals are crawling competitor Web sites, and making the information available and searchable to staff. Competitive data is integrated with internal resources for better strategic planning.
  • Information managers are using the Gatherer to create URL catalogs. End users who wish to read more information can click on the provided URLs.
  • Marketing is crawling the most current versions of pricing, article reprints, slide and multimedia presentations, white papers, etc., and providing this information to the sales group.
  • Human resources is spidering company policy and procedures manuals and making them available on a corporate-wide basis. Time-consuming updates and printing costs are completely eliminated in the process.
  • MIS is using harvesting tools to create a corporate-wide view of the distributed information resources on their corporate intranet that can be queried via a Web browser.

Inmagic Gatherer delivers high value and flexibility with relatively low management overhead, low implementation costs, and rapid deployment. Click here for information in PDF format.

System Requirements for the Gatherer:

Hardware

Intel Pentium processor, 90 MHz minimum
384 megabytes RAM minimum (512 MB RAM recommended)
240 megabytes hard drive space for application
Additional hard drive space for gathered content

Operating System

Windows 2000 Professional or Server, Service Pack 3 or
Windows XP Professional

Web Server

Microsoft Internet Information Server 5 or later with Active Server Pages
Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.0 or later

Other Software

Inmagic Content Server v 1.1 or later
Adobe PDF IFilter for extraction of PDF documents

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For more information, we invite you to contact us:

Crew-Noble Information Services
323 El Pintado Heights Drive
Danville, CA 94526-1412
Telephone: (925) 837-1399
Fax: (925) 820-9114
Email: service@crewnoble.com

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Revised: 09/02/05